GANDHINAGAR (The Thursday Times) — A court in India’s Gujarat has sentenced three Muslim men to life imprisonment for slaughtering a cow, opening its judgment with four pages on the sanctity of cows that cite the Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, and the Manusmriti.
The sessions court in Gandhinagar said cows are “revered as the mother of the universe” and that 33 crore deities are believed to reside in them, the Deccan Herald reported on Wednesday. It described the Manusmriti, an ancient legal text, as recognising the cow “not merely as an animal but as an equal” and as the “axis” of dharma.
‘Mother cows will become extinct’
The court said the three men, Wasim Kureshi, Mohammad Rafiq Kureshi and Asfak Bahelim, knew that “cows are considered as mothers” but still “mercilessly slaughtered” one. “If such accused…are not punished as prescribed by law, the mother cows will become extinct with the passage of time,” it said.
They were convicted under the Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, among other charges, and each was sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for life and fined Rs3 lakh. The court said the men bought old or non-milking cattle cheaply and slaughtered them for business, and that police caught them as they prepared to sell the meat, seizing about 277kg of beef.
Life for a cow
Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state, toughened its cow protection law in 2017 to allow life sentences for cow slaughter. About half of India’s states and union territories, most of them governed by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, ban the slaughter of cows partly or completely, and rights groups say enforcement has often been left to Hindu vigilante groups. Human Rights Watch found that at least 44 people, 36 of them Muslims, were killed in cow-related violence between May 2015 and December 2018.
